Magis, Christophe

Asset management as a cultural industry. Socio-economic approach to trading platforms - 2022.


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This article focuses on digital applications for asset management – such as Robinhood, Trading 212 or eToro – which have experienced a certain boom during the year 2020. The reasons for this boom is here questioned in a three-dimensional socioeconomic analysis consisting of: 1) an examination of these platforms' emergence in the wake of the post-2008 economic and financial recovery, alongside the breakthrough of the "FinTech" discourse and its promises of bringing together finance with the "Counter-cultural" imagination of the culture and communication industries; 2) a socioeconomic modelling of these services, which entangle cultural and non-cultural logics; 3) a study of the uses of these platforms which fit into an ambiguous space between economic, social and cultural practices. This allows the testing of the following hypothesis: in the current mutations of the culture and communication industries, the digital applications for asset management have contributed to bringing stock trading into the field of cultural consumption and practices.